Scientists using American space technology have started a huge project to digitally photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, and post it on the World Wide Web for all to see, Israeli authorities said Wednesday.

High-tech cameras using infrared photography are being used to uncover sections of the 2,000-year-old scrolls that have faded by the centuries and become indecipherable, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said.

The project is expected to take about five years and the goal is to assemble the scrolls accessible to scientists and the general public, Antiquities Authority official Pnina Shor said.

“Now for the first instance the scrolls will be a computer go away,” said Shor, who heads the authority’s office responsible for the conservation of artifacts. “This will ensure that the scrolls are preserved for another 2,000 years.”

Experts have complained for years that only a small number of scholars have been allowed access to the scrolls and

the thousands of fragments that were found in caves near the Dead Sea in the late 1940s. In recent years, steps have been taken to widen access, but many of the findings are still not properly identified and categorized.

To protect the scrolls, Shor said, the new imaging will be done in a setting that minimizes exposure to light.

A pilot project started Wednesday and when it is finished, it will be possible to determine how towering it will take to digitize the thousands of fragments from about 900 separate documents, Shor said, estimating five years.

The American space connection came through Greg Bearman, who recently retired as principal scientist for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He offered the space-age imaging equipment.

“I am an archeology buff,” he told The Associated Press, and he brought imaging technology used in space to the Dead Sea Scrolls project. “This equipment is used to study…

Original post by dhiram